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Kurosawa Ayumu Goes Flying

Contributed by Nicolas Papaconstantinou on 12/08/10

Instinctively, Kurosawa Ayumu knows that he has very little time to make a decision.

He steps back from the window, out of sight of the men who, he calculates, must be taking up positions on the low roof opposite, and are probably armed with, at the very least, handguns. More likely rifles, but their presence there is plenty enough to keep him from a cautious escape onto the nearby fire-escape, and they probably know that.

A glance at the main door to his hotel room suggests that getting through it would be a matter of some attrition, with severe burns to his arms and legs the absolute best he can expect. He already knows that he doesn’t have time to work out whether the fire is limited to this room – fuel poured under his door, perhaps – or whether his life is worth the torching of a whole floor of four-star hotel guests.

Either way, the corridor isn’t worth the effort. If it isn’t ablaze, an enemy who would think to put men on his window would also have insurance out in the arteries of the hotel.

He only wonders for the briefest of moments who that enemy might be.

A casual observer might be forgiven for assuming that a man in his line of work might often find themselves mired in such chaos, but the truth of it is that for the most part, Kurosawa Ayumu’s life has always been a calm affair.

This is the case geographically, and emotionally, as well as practically. Though the world might look at the most harshly measured impact that the man has had on the world, and consider him a violent and heartless murderer, Ayumu has always lived set apart from the angry roiling of the societies and civilisations he works in, and has not troubled himself with the judgement of such chaotic structures.

He insulates himself from them with preparation. He insulates himself from them with intense research and planning, and the clarity of purpose to take into account all contingencies.

Most of all, he insulates himself from the concerns that the rest of us find suffocating by making his works appear invisible. He is the master of the staged accident. Of never being where he is sought out, and never being looked for in the first place.

There is a problem with the way he lives his life, though, and it is one he had already realised once tonight, when waking from such a perplexing dream into chaos.

Ayumu’s father – or maybe it had not been his father – had once taught him the trick to walking a tightrope.

“The trick to walking a tightrope…” he had said, to the attentive, awestruck boy “…is to ignore all that is not relevant, and pay respect to all that is.”

The boy had said that he did not understand, and received a fist to the head for his impertinence.

“Wind shear. Width of the rope. Amount of give in the line. Distribution of your body mass. These are the things which are relevant.” The man had said. “Distance from the ground. Hardness of the ground. The notion of falling. These things are not. And these. Are. The. Things. That. Will make you fall.” He concluded, punctuating his final words with sharp raps to the boy’s head.

… And this had been the lesson which, though years of rigid training, and years of blood spilled, had stuck with him the most. He had applied it to all things. No matter how high or low the task, consider the things which are relevant. Discard the things which are not.

If you have considered and accommodated all outcomes, vagaries of morality become irrelevant. Chaos becomes irrelevant.

But tonight, for one reason and another, Kurosawa Ayumu has found himself sleeping in a hotel that he has not had time to research, in a city that he has not prepared a mission-plan for. He has not prepared a mission plan because there is no mission. He had, perhaps uncharacteristically, not considered a need for caution, because he was not travelling under the auspices of his work.

Nobody in New York has any reason to know that he iss here, or any reason to consider it significant if they do.

And this is the problem with the way that Kurosawa Ayumu lives his life. The random, messy lives of other people below may look insignificant from the tightrope, but if, for some unforeseen reason, you find yourself falling, despite all preparation, down into that chaos…

Well, a life of balancing, with perfect poise, on the tightrope, doesn’t rightly prepare one for that chaos, no matter how capable one is with a gun.

Speaking of which, he still has his guns. Two semi-autos, under his pillow. The blanket is smouldering, but he can still reach them without catching flames himself.

Though not at his best without the protection of forethought, Ayumu is one of the stronger minds in his business, and a plan is formulating. It is not one that he has confidence in – it only gets him to the next place, without knowing where the next place is, for example – but it is one he is willing to commit to.

So he commits…

Stepping closer to the exposed window, he raises his guns, and fires them through it. This close to the burning wood of the frame, smoke gets in his eyes, and he squints against the tears springing there. Taking care to stagger shots between the guns, to make the maximum amount of noise and clamor, he has no way of knowing where his enemies are, or whether he has hit them, but that isn’t the point.

He knows that, for a moment at least, their heads will be down behind cover, against his random fire.

He takes that moment, stepping quickly up onto the window ledge, elbows scraping against loose glass, and pushes off into the cooler air, flames catching at his clothes.

In many other cities, this would be the end of him. Only three storeys up, yes, but still enough to break a body landing awkwardly on concrete, from this high up.

But this is New York, five weeks into a dispute between the garbage collectors and City Hall, and instead of concrete, Kurosawa Ayumu falls heavy into five weeks of accumulated garbage, collecting like a snow drift at the wall of the building. He still hits hard – to an observer, the stinking, undulating, thin black-plastic layer of full bags does not seem to have slowed him down at all – but where it counts, in the now jangling bones of his body, and the skull that glanced off of a bursting bag of rotted vegetables instead of the hard brick of the alley wall, this gamble has paid off.

It doesn’t yet feel that way to Ayumu, though. Unable to bury a groan as he gets to his feet, pushing through the starbursts in his head, he attempts to extricate himself from the refuse. It feels like tentacles pulling at his legs and arms, but he takes comfort in how easily most of the stuff falls away. At one point he feels resistance at his forearm, but a sharp yank gets him clear, though for some reason the attendant sensation makes him feel suddenly nauseous.

He pushes on a few steps, aware that his leg is pulling a little, tough at the thigh, and after looking down at it, opts to leave the pieces of glass jutting from it in place. There’ll be time for open wounds later, he thinks, though noticing the damage suddenly gives it license to hurt, jagged pain blossoming out at several points.

He is almost at the buzz of the street when his hand brushes along the arm that had pulled back on him before, and finds the unforgiving point protruding there, sharp enough to make him pull his hand away, flinching. Ayumu looks down, and finds the shaft of a needle, the remains of a syringe, broken off into the muscle of his forearm – there is a channel pulled across, there, exposing the meat, the metal pulled diagonal where he had forced it earlier.

He has no way of knowing what was in the discarded syringe, and it is too dangerous to go back and look for the glass chamber that he probably broke away in his haste. Even if he did stand a chance of finding it.

The glass in his leg is stopping his blood from flowing out, but blood is spurting freely from the hollow of the needle in his arm, and he is certain this isn’t a good thing. Biting on his bottom lip, he pinches down on the tube with his hand, and tries to slide it free.

It doesn’t come as easy as he expects it to, and the pain makes him forget himself for a second. He knows it’s only a second, because his assailants haven’t arrived in the alleyway yet.

Holding on to the extracted needle, he pulls himself out on to the street. the people there studiously ignore him, and he believes this is for the best. He makes a fast assessment of his environment, and moves on, into this new chaos.